Album and book cover art are my two favorite mediums. While every piece of art contains depth greater than its colors, each piece of cover art is forced to represent all that it literally contains. It's a great burden, and many independently beautiful pieces of art have collapsed on the foundation of weak writing and poorly composed songs. When the level of quality coincides, however, covers are deeply powerful and affect me in a way no other visual form can.

That said, you can imagine how I dorked out when I saw someone selling an exact reproduction of the 1st edition of The Great Gatsby for less than the ugly new version on Amazon. I won't get into the coolness of First Edition Library and how it's currenly on hiatus; I'll just say I was lucky to see this book on the same morning it went up for sale.

Because I teach it, I've read The Great Gatsby eight or nine times, and I love it more each time. The themes are as relevant as the day it was written, the characters inhabit the real word, the symbols are both striking and natural, and Fitzgerald strung words together so beautifully that it's practically a 200 page poem. The cover could be hung in a museum even without an associated story, yet it represents all of these things as well. Does visual art get any stronger?

P.S. Adrian, your senior art show was my favorite.

P.P.S. If people really stop buying physical albums, I think record shops should become art shops where you buy album art that comes with a code to download the album. Of Montreal sort of tried it, but I'm talking shops full of this stuff. Posters, t-shirts, mobiles, etc., each tied to a specific album. What do you think? Bad idea? Yeah, I hope vinyl never dies.